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One of the biggest surprises of this year’s Oscar nominations (one of the few that doesn’t refer to the inevitable colossal omissions), is the Best Costumes nomination of Antonella Cannarozzi for the film I Am Love by Luca Guadagnino. What’s surprising has nothing to with the quality; the costumes by Cannarozzi, largely inspired by the monochromatic aesthetic of Jil Sander are beautiful and worthy of our admiration because it’s how we wish Milan’s members of high-society would dress: rigorously and essentially. Just as we wish that we could believe that in Italy, we all could live in marvelous homes like Villa Necchi, where the film was set.

No, the surprise comes from the fact that Cannarozzi really had no chance (and I’m sure she was just as surprised as we were by the news of her nomination). First of all, I Am Love wasn’t submitted by Italy as a film in the running for an Oscar, that honor was given to Paolo Virzì for the movie The First Beautiful Thing – a movie that received a giant push from the national public relations machine. Secondly, Cannarozzi wasn’t nominated by the prestigious Costume Designers Guild, and those nominations are usually then repeated when it comes time to select Academy Award nominees (and the symmetry here is justified: the Oscar nominations are decided by costume designers that are members of the Academy, and most of them are part of the Guild). Thirdly, Cannarozzi was in competition with much more important and visible films in the same category (for example, Amy Westcott forBlack Swan, or the costumes for Tron: Legacy), whose nominations were taken for granted.

The only explanation then, for her nomination, is the success that Guadagnino’s film had overseas, as demonstrated by the standing ovation it received by the foreign press (The New York Times compared it to a novel by D. H. Lawrence, with the precious addition of chandeliers). The film was nominated for the Golden Globes, for a Bafta, and was well-reviewed by the Bible of the movie industry, Variety magazine, which thought that the movie could possibly earn Tilda Swinton a nomination for Best Actress.

The fact is not so much whether I Am Love deserves this nomination for its costumes, just as it’s not about whether it deserved to be nominated for Best Foreign Film (or other categories). As we all well know, the Oscars are for the most part a money machine that doesn’t necessarily prize quality in and of itself, but responds to other stimuli (like a film’s memorability or its publicity barrage). Therefore, if Italy wanted to seriously participate in this game, it should have nominated its most talked-about film, one that was pre-disposed to get and keep attention. The Italian jury that had the responsibility of choosing the film to submit to the Academy had all the data necessary to favor the film by Guadagnino. And, if they had been a bit more cunning, Italy could have earned a handful of nominations.